Sweet, sweet retirement

I have less than 17 months until I retire from the U.S. Navy with 20 years of service. It will be a meager retirement paycheck plus benefits and I will in no way be able to live on just the check from Uncle Sam- unless we live in a cardboard box and fish our food out of Burger King dumpsters.

I found this entry in one of my journals. The 'military speak' has been dumbed down as much as possible so that the content of the entries can be understood by people who aren't in the military, people who are in a different branch of the military, or people who are in the military but have to read it every freakin day and do not wish to read it on a blog.

Shit I Won't Have to Deal With When I'm Retired

1. Taking a shower and bouncing off cold steel walls because the dickhead Officer of the Deck decides to go to periscope depth during turnover. (the sip rolls from side to side if the seas are high)

2. Shower door popping open because of ship's angle. (Imagine trying to soap your self down and keep your balance while using one arm to keep the accordion style door from opening and hitting you and letting the 68 degree air into the shower)

3. Rolling my clothes up into a bundle when I sit on the shitter so they won't soak up all the piss and standing water on the deck.

4. Living with stinky assholes who don't shower. (There is nowhere to escape, no window to open, no air freshener to spray , and to make matters worse, when running drills all the air conditioning is secured except to vital areas)

5. Snorers, who sound like Paul Bunyan having an explosive case of diarrhea into a concrete bowl, that keep 10+ people awake. (I never understood why someone just didn't round up all the snorers and kept them all in one berthing area. Then they could keep each other awake instead of people that don't sound like they have a case of severe sleep apnea having who get no sleep in the 12 hour off time.)

6. Finding shit-stained underwear lodged in the overheads in berthing and in the bathrooms.

7. Useless prewatch and periscope depth briefs. (These briefs are the boredom equivalent of having to listen to your barber go into great detail on how, exactly, he is going to cut your hair.)

8. Smelling the food grinder (equiv. garbage disposal) all over the boat as it churns the leftover food scraps into a disgusting soup before sending them to the same tank we send our human shit to. (There is an isolation valve that is only opened during this process so that the stink is confined to the piping. This is the equivalent of sending your garbage disposal waste to your septic tank and having to smell that mess everytime you use it.)

9. Extra riders.(This is the equivalent of having 4-5 strangers show up for every road trip you and your friends go on. All you have to drive is a 1985 Honda Accord and the riders don't pay for food, beer or gas. They sleep the whole trip or watch movies on their DVD player and don't offer to drive.)

10. Not being able to take a piss when I want/have to (because the bathroom is full, not working because they are using low pressure air to blow all the poop out of the collection tank, or the ship's barber has a line of people waiting and it is impossible to reach a stall.)